One of the participants of the Soma workshop done in Montreal, in October 2011, wrote an article about it. It’s a very personal account of her experience and can give an insight of how Soma workshops have moved away from therapy to focus in activism and activists. You can read it, in English and French, at the Levier – Engrenage Noir site .

 

Soma – an anarchist laboratory

OCTOBER 2011

Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday (6, 7, 8 and 9th)  10:00 am – 6:00pm

Salle Fernand Daoust / Centre St-Pierre

1212, Panet

Montréal

Organized by Engrenage Noir / LEVIER, as part of the “Post Launch” Activities. Following the release of its publication at the end of June, AFFIRMING COLLABORATION: Community and Humanist Activist Art in Québec and Elsewhere, Engrenage Noir / LEVIER continues the celebrations by offering a series of three exciting workshops linked to the content of its publication, facilitated by people who have collaborated with LEVIER throughout the years.

More information: http://www.engrenagenoir.ca/blog/en/archives/4959#more-4959

“Adventures in the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex” is coming out next month. Have a look at this article from author Christopher Turner: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/08/wilhelm-reich-free-love-orgasmatron

 

‬Saturday,‭ 25th June ‬2011‭ ‬
12.30pm-5.30pm
Offmarket
121 Lower Clapton Road‬
London E5 0NP

*Schedule:

1. How to be a Human?‬, 3 hours

‎Bringing ideas on collectivity from Soma and Theatre of the Oppressed into the classroom. A series of workshops using physical and collaborative games leading to an interactive performance, to explore key concepts and processes of the citizenship curriculum (for KS3 and above).Citizenship is the term we use to talk about the social organisation of human beings living together. How do we relate to each other? In a period where we are surrounded by video games and virtual social networks, it is quite easy to forget the body and the skills necessary to form social relationships. Our approach breaks the traditional way to develop skills, where the mind is split from the body, the individual removed from its surroundings. The games are invitations to play in a group, sharing experiences of collaboration, trust and responsibility. After the games, a process of reflection, talking and writing will unpack the group’s perceptions and behaviour when playing together. Each session will finish with producing a theatrical freeze frame triggering a final performance.

 

2. Stories from Mexico, 40 minutes plus discussion.

A session sharing tales from radical pedagogy projects in Mexico in prisons, in small communities and in a Zapatista Cafe. A few short activities will be tried out based on the work of La Lleca, a prisoner’s justice group in Mexico city working on love.

When: Wednesday, June 1 · 5:30pm – 8:30pm

Where: Central St Martins School of Art and Design – 10, Back Hill – London EC1R 5EN

To book a place: mayralinaress@googlemail.com

An experiment using Soma group methodology to reflect about Psychology and power relations

          “If therapy has found space to spread out as a commodity in capitalist society, it’s because being listened to became rare and institutionalised, as the notion of a private life grew, rather than the function of friends and communities. In this crazy time when people spend lots of money to have someone to listen to them talking about their life, we could think of psychological therapies as a new religions, with all metaphors well applied, like guilt/sin, therapy/confession, prescription/ritual and health/cure.

            Neurosis, paranoia, anxiety, or depression; everything becomes a symptom for the prescriptions of pills, and recipes in self-help books. The speed that ‘scientific’ truths change place confuses anyone that relies only on cartographies such as psychology, neurophysiology, cognition, hormones, genetics. What we believe today as a fact, using science to explain feelings and emotions, might be in doubt tomorrow, but this doesn’t matter to the consumers of therapy. They carry on believing in the authority of the therapist with scientific knowledge, which is another product of the neurosis of capitalism.”

26.03.2011 – March for the Alternative – against the government cuts on public services: a long day of different ways of protesting.

Lost in the crowd! It’s not every day one can walk down the streets feeling the mob.

Found in the chaos! The wooden Trojan horse does a ‘sit in’ at Oxford Circus, while banks and big shops had a bad day for business.

Lost and found in the night! At Trafalgar Square, the police took a while to realize what was going on…

Somaseed has been part of ‘Nanopolitics: experiments in radical movement’ since last year. Nano is a series of open workshops which “sets out to explore how we move between (spaces of) radical experimentation, intimacy, struggle, alienation, heteronormativity, competitiveness; and the relationships between the experiences and conditions of precarious, post-fordist life and work and the potential for political action that emerges in this nexus”.  

The next Nano sessions will be:

12th March, 2-6pm, as part of the Arts against Cuts Long Weekend
How to engage at the margins of a demo: games, formats, tools
a workshop using Soma, Theatre of the Oppressed and other methodologies to explore, understand and activate the margins of our protests.
Attendance for full 4 hours is required.
Location of the Long weekend is to be announced.

27th March, 2-6pm
Our protest: resonances, impressions, processes
a workshop to tell of experiences, reflect and imagine, using our resonant bodies in various ways.
This will be largely based on Theatre of the Oppressed and Soma methodologies.
Location tbc

Get in touch to get info and details.

Welcome to SomaLab! Created in Brazil as an anarchist therapy, by Roberto Freire, Soma has been used as a social laboratory, bringing art, activism and learning new skills together. Participants are invited to play as a way to rediscover the body, sharing collaboration games to rethink relationships. Jorge Goia, a Soma facilitator trained by Freire, describes here this journey from therapy to experiment. Enjoy it!